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Memory and Repetition: Reenactment as an Affirmative Critical Practice Susanne Knittel Two days before the premiere of Milo Rau’s Breivik’s Statement, set for Octo- ber 19, 2012, the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar canceled the performance. As a result, Rau moved the performance to a nearby cinema. The piece was a reenactment of the speech Anders B. Breivik had delivered six months earlier to the Oslo court in April 2012, when he stood trial for the mur- der of seventy-seven people. The hourlong speech in which Breivik explains the motivation for his deeds was not broadcast on television or reproduced in the news media. Yet bits and pieces of the speech were spread almost immedi- ately via Twitter and other social media. Rau’s reenactment constituted the first public performance of the speech in its entirety. The theater was concerned that this reenactment would be misconstrued as an endorsement or vindication of Breivik’s views: Thomas Schmidt, then the director of the theater, stated that he did not want to “provide a platform” for Breivik’s arguments.1 In response, The research and writing of this article were made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organiza- tion for Scientific Research. I would like to thank Kári Driscoll, Kathrin Thiele, Richard Schechner, Gerd Bayer, and Brad Prager for their helpful comments on drafts of this article. Thanks also to Milo Rau and Mirjam Knapp. An earlier version has appeared as “Ante los perpetradores: Repetición, reenactment, representación,” in El infierno de los perpetradores: Imágenes, relatos y conceptos, edited by Anacleto Ferrer and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca (Valencia: Edicions Bellaterra and Alfons el Magnànim, 2019), 273–96. 1. Höbel, “Zoff um Breivik.” New German Critique 137, Vol. 46, No. 2, August 2019 DOI 10.1215/0094033X-7546234 © 2019 by New German Critique, Inc. 171 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-pdf/46/2 (137)/171/651361/171knittel.pdf by UNIV LIBRARY UTRECHT - LB SERIALS user on 12 August 2019 172 Memory and Repetition the critic Dirk Pilz lambasted the theater for eliding the difference between the text and the performance and, more scandalously, for its lack of confidence in the power of art to stimulate critical thinking: “Here ignorance meets fear of the power that Breivik’s text might gain on stage and the debate that theater can provoke. They are not distancing themselves from Breivik but from art.”2 Indeed, as Pilz emphasizes, the performance is anything but an authentic or realistic representation of the trial. Rau has taken several precautions to “de- dramatize” and “de-theatricalize” the speech:3 Breivik’s text is read out by the Turkish German actress Sascha Ö. Soydan, who stands at a lectern wearing a T-shirt and a track-suit jacket, chewing gum. Soydan does not address the audience directly but speaks into a camera, which relays a close-up of her upper body to a large screen at center stage (fig. 1). Soydan’s delivery is largely purged of affect, and she reads in a sober, matter-of-fact style, pausing every so often to sip from a bottle of water. She does not comment on the text at any point, and there are no prompts to tell the audience how to respond to this performance. Therein lies the troubling ambiguity of the piece. This lack of an interpretative “safety net” was presumably what gave the Weimar theater cold feet; indeed, subsequent performances in Munich, Basel, and elsewhere were also canceled, forcing Rau to find alternative venues.4 Rau does not explain Breivik but focuses entirely on his words. These words, however, are not the insane ramblings of a madman; rather, they form a coherent narrative that sounds uncannily familiar. What is disturbing about the speech is that it is not disturbing at all: the thoughts and sentiments expressed in it have become all too familiar in public discourse in Europe today. In fact, as Rau himself emphasized in the Q&A after a performance in Rotterdam, spokespeople for several of Europe’s right-wing populist parties, including Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom and Christoph Blocher’s Swiss People’s Party, responded to Breivik’s self-justification by saying that they condemned his actions but shared his concerns. This is a distinction that Rau will not accept: for him, the violence is already inherent in the words. And his rationale for allowing Breivik’s words to speak for themselves, stripped of their imme- diate context and sensationalist framing, is precisely to confront people with the troubling fact that such views are part of everyday political rhetoric in Europe. From this perspective, perhaps the theater directors were right to fear the power of the words. If the violence is already inherent in the language, then 2. Pilz, “Skandal um Theaterlesung.” 3. Rau, “Regisseur bringt Breivik ins Theater.” 4. SRF, “Wirbel um ‘Breiviks Erklärung’ in Basel.” Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-pdf/46/2 (137)/171/651361/171knittel.pdf by UNIV LIBRARY UTRECHT - LB SERIALS user on 12 August 2019 Susanne Knittel 173 Figure 1. The actress Sascha Ö. Soydan reading the statement Anders B. Breivik gave during his trial in Oslo. Photograph by Thomas Müller © 2012 IIPM. how can we be sure that in repeating it we are not also repeating that violence? Clearly, Rau has taken significant measures to avoid celebrating or simply restating that violence, but at the same time, his staging seeks to avoid placing the speech in an overdetermined critical framework that would neutralize it by modeling the appropriate response for the spectator. This precarious undertak- ing is what makes Rau’s approach particularly powerful and volatile. It hinges on the ability of repetition to create a difference, but this is a difference that must be produced anew in each performance. The tension between difference and repetition is a hallmark of what Carol Martin terms the “theatre of the real,” which is increasingly prevalent in the twenty-first century and which encompasses a wide variety of forms, media, and practices, from historical reenactment to performance art to living history museums, from documentary theater to theater of witness to autobiographical theater.5 These all share a concern with questions of representation, represent- ability, mediality, and reality or authenticity. Scholarship on reenactment has focused on the affective significance of reenactments for the reenactors themselves, on pedagogical uses of reenactments, or on their relevance for historical 5. Martin, Theatre of the Real,5. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-pdf/46/2 (137)/171/651361/171knittel.pdf by UNIV LIBRARY UTRECHT - LB SERIALS user on 12 August 2019 174 Memory and Repetition knowledge production.6 The reenactments I discuss here, however, belong to another category entirely, and central to all of them are questions of critique and of political and civic engagement.7 They are hybrid forms that incorporate elements of historical reenactment, performance art, and documentary theater. Staged in the theater, in the studio, or at the actual sites of historical events, reenactments of this kind bring documents to life (literally performing the archive), a process in which the spectators participate as witnesses. These reenactments are not nostalgic; the past is not viewed as singular and separate from the present, and the events are reenacted precisely because of their importance as a potential critique of the present. Furthermore, they are all concerned with the rhetorical power of perpetrator speech and with probing the psychology of mass murderers through a restaging or reenactment of documents written or spoken by perpetrators of mass violence. The Franco-German filmmaker Romuald Karmakar, for example, has undertaken two projects similar to Breivik’s Statement: the three-hour film Das Himmler-Projekt (2000), in which the actor Manfred Zapatka reads the entire manuscript of Heinrich Himmler’s infamous Posen speech, and Die Ham- burger Lektionen (2006), in which Zapatka reads two sermons by Mohammed Fazazi, the former imam of a Hamburg mosque frequented by three of the ter- rorists involved in the 9/11 attacks. While these reenactments focus on aural repetition, hearing the words again in a different context, other reenactments emphasize the visual dimension not only by repeating the words but by re- creating a scene in minute detail, with costumes, sets, makeup, and gestures. An example of this is Rau’s Die letzten Tage der Ceaușescus (2009–10), which restages the trial in which the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, were sentenced to death in 1989. Still others, such as the performances by the Historikerlabor, are based on the repetition of a key perpetrator document but are supplemented by additional documentary materials.8 Idiscuss 6. Recent studies of thesevarious forms of reenactment include Lüttiken, Life, Once More;Magels- sen, Living History Museums;McCalmanandPickering,Historical Reenactment; and Agnew and Lamb, Settler and Creole Reenactment. Rebecca Schneider’s excellent book Performing Remains brings together a whole range of reenactments in art, theater, photography, and living history. 7. In this they are more similar to, yet different from, the pieces discussed by Carol Martin in Thea- tre of the Real or in Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. 8. For example, the Historikerlabor’s reenactments of the Wannsee Conference in 2012 or of the Hunger Plan Conference in 2014. Based in Berlin, the historians’ lab is a group of professional historians who reconstruct and stage key events of the planning of Nazi extermination policies. Situated between reenactment and reconstruction, their work is an excellent example of practice-based research or, in Martin’s words, of embodied kinesthetic historiography (Theatre of the Real, 11).

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